Home is Where the Heart Is
by Checkerboards
Summary: The sequel to 'Playing House'. The year in Gotham is drawing to a close, but Jackie and the Riddler have some unfinished business with certain acquaintances...and each other.
1. Holiday Greetings

Christmas is a magical time. It's a time for love, for sharing, for snuggling by the fire and kissing under the mistletoe and doing all the tooth-rottingly sweet things that are a tradition for the season.

Christmas in Gotham is a little different. Oh, certainly there are decorations dangling over the streets, with festive red and green graffiti scrawled on every plastic reindeer. Snow does cover the ground, even if it is black from car exhaust and thousands of filthy booted feet. And there is mistletoe - plastic, fraying mistletoe that's guaranteed not to piss off a certain green-skinned botanist who may or may not take vengeance on live mistletoe's shortened lifespan by coming to kill _you_.

Edward Nygma, Prince of Puzzles, King of Cryptograms, and Baron of Bedspring Lockpicks, was thoroughly enjoying the holidays for once. At the moment, he was sprawled happily on his favorite beat-up old green sofa in a tiny satellite lair, with his green silk pajamas almost hidden under the mountainous fluff of his green bathrobe. _A Christmas Story_ was on channel 32, a small turkey was browning in the oven, and best of all, Batman had no idea where he was. Could the holidays _get_ any better?

_Thud_. "Ow!"

"Are you okay?" he called lazily down the little hallway.

"I'm fine," Jackie muttered, thumping a large cardboard box out of the closet. "I'd be better if you'd have let me _pack_ first."

"I told you," he drawled, snuggling back into the pillows, "we had to get here as soon as possible. There wasn't time to pack." There had hardly been time to breathe. He'd wasted precious time after the escape catching his breath in that warehouse - running from Arkham didn't normally involve that much actual _running_, and he'd been exhausted - and then he'd wasted even more time racing from lair to lair looking for Jackie. By the time he'd found her fast asleep in the showplace lair, he'd barely had enough energy left to yank her out of bed and shove her out the door.

Jackie sneezed viciously as a new puff of dust rocketed up from the box lid. "Well, at least there's something here for me to wear," she said, prodding the newly-revealed pile of henchgirl outfits that had been stuffed into the box. "Maybe," she added, dangling a complicated set of green straps from one hand. "Don't your girls ever wear _clothes_?"

"Hey!" he grinned, leaping to his feet. "I've been looking everywhere for that!"

She regarded it suspiciously. "You...wear _this_?"

He lifted it from her hand and buckled it quickly around himself. "This is for the pistols," he said, gesturing at the two holsters tucked just over his hips, "and these little hooks are for the exploding question marks...what?"

"Nothing," Jackie choked, obviously stifling laughter. "You look very...threatening, I'm sure." Fuzzy green fluff from his bathrobe puffed from gaps in the buckles.

"It's supposed to go under my suit," he said, exasperated. A knock rat-tatted on the door. Eddie sidled over to the door, looking somewhat like a kitten on a SWAT team, and cracked the front door open a sliver. "Yes?"

"Paper!"

"**Look! A known detected sin**_._" Eddie pulled the newspaper inside.

"Uh, you're welcome," the kid stammered as Eddie slammed the door. Most people in this city couldn't get personal delivery of the newspaper whenever they pleased. (Then again, most people didn't have a small army of henchman wannabes and street rats eager to get a foot in the door by carrying out whatever little wishes they had.)

Eddie gently unfolded the newspaper, grinning as he saw the front page unroll before him. "MASS ESCAPE FROM ARKHAM!" the headlines blared, accompanied by a very harried-looking picture of the current asylum administrator slamming the door in the photographer's face. It had been a fabulous idea to spring everyone at once. Two dozen rogues escaping from Arkham together - well, as together as the rogues ever were - was an event that was certain to keep the vigilantes busy and off of his tail for a while. Oh, sure, it meant that cops were going to be lining the streets like buttons on an accordion, but what did it matter? He wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.

A small green envelope slipped from the pages of the paper and landed on his foot. A letter? Eddie gently set the newspaper down and scooped it up, automatically turning it right-side up. In sparkly purple ink, someone had scrawled "TO QUERY".

Odd. "Query?" he called.

Jackie stuck her head out of the closet. "My _name_ is Jackie," she said pointedly. "Do I go around calling you "Riddler" all the time?"

"Well, if you're not Query, maybe I should just throw this letter out," he teased, fluttering it in her direction.

Jackie leaned a little further out of the closet, peering over the pile of dresses draped over her shoulder. "I have a letter?"

"I don't know. Are you Query?"

"Are you a jerkface? Give me the letter!"

"Jerkface?" Eddie staggered backward in mock dismay. "I took you in, gave you a roof over your head, and this is how you repay me?"

She skipped over and snatched at the letter. He twitched it away. With her arms firmly crossed, she stuck out her tongue at him. "If you hadn't burned down my house in the first place - "

"_You_ burned it down," he reminded her.

"Oh really?" She pointed at the wall. "As I recall it, I was in Vermont when you were rigging your little flamethrower up. You know, like that one _there - _" Eddie obligingly looked in the direction she was indicating. "Yoink!" she cried, grabbing the envelope from his hands and darting away. "Sucker!"

"I _let_ you take it," he informed her.

"Whatever." She slit the envelope open with her thumb and popped a piece of black stationery out, squinting at more of that sparkly purple ink. "_Dear Query_...who gave this to you?" she demanded, looking up.

"Why? Who's it from?"

"Read it yourself." She tossed the little paper over to him.

"Dear Query, blah blah blah..." He skimmed over the introductory small talk. "We've been thinking it over, and we've figured out the perfect way to fix this. Pretty soon Eddie won't be a problem anymore. In fact, we think you'll really get a kick out of what we're planning! We'll be by at about two to talk to you about it. See you then! - Q, Q, Q."

Eddie went pale. He'd seen things like this happen before with other rogues' henchgirls. Hell, it had happened to _him_ more than once! First they worked for you, then they loved you, then they tried to kill you - and being chased down by Batman, even Batman at his most furious, wasn't nearly as frightening as waking up to find yourself in the clutches of your brand-new extremely well-armed ex-girlfriend.

He'd learned, though, since the first one. He'd stopped letting them find out how to arm the deathtraps after he'd come to inside that giant toothy Sphinx mouth, and it was only due to an overtalkative henchman that he'd wound up in the robotic whale trap at the zoo. In fact, in recent times, he'd only had to worry about the little vengeances - knotted and over-dried laundry, lairs turned over to the cops, the occasional attempted stabbing...

With these three, though, who knew what would happen? He'd never dated them - he barely knew them! - and they'd fixated on him with the kind of tenacity usually displayed by wolverines at a kill. He _wouldn't be a problem_ anymore? They loved him! They hated him! They wanted him dead! What the _hell_ were they thinking?

He was going to die. They were going to come there and kill him because they wanted him and couldn't have him, so they were going to kill him so Jackie couldn't have him either, or maybe they were going to hug him to bits again and _then _kill him, or maybe -

"Eddie!" Jackie said, drawing his attention to the fact that he'd been muttering his thoughts aloud for the last few minutes. "Snap out of it!"

Eddie's face stretched into a wild-eyed look of absolute terror. "They're gonna sex me to death!"

"EDDIE!" Jackie shook him by the shoulders. "We've got to get out of here!"

"We can't!" With shaking hands, he dropped the letter. "The cops are everywhere and I'm not going back to Arkham!"

"Isn't Arkham better than death?"

He gave her a flat, terrified look. "No. And anyway, the cops out there are more likely to shoot me than nicely arrest me." He raked a hand through his hair. "I hate getting shot. It's such a pain," he muttered absently.

"Okay, so we'll hide! We'll stay away from the police stations, and -"

"The cops are _everywhere_!" he snapped. "Every rogue in town is on the loose! Look!" He snatched up the remote and feverishly prodded the channel down button until the screen filled with a local station. They were running a twenty-four-hour news broadcast showing the stream of police patrolling the major streets, looking for the newly-escaped Arkhamites. "We won't get two blocks!"

Jackie bit her lip. "We can't leave."

"Right!"

"And we can't stay."

"Right!"

A slow grin split her face. "I think I've got it. They can't catch you if they can't _find_ you..."

"How am I going to hide in this tiny apartment?" he demanded, waving frantic, fluffy arms at the miniscule living room.

"I have a plan."

(_to be continued_)

* * *

_Author's Note: The escape from Arkham took place in a story that I haven't posted yet. The original plan was to post that story before this one - but then life got busy, what with the visit from my parents and the trip to the ER and all the rest of the lovely stuff that's happened in the past few weeks. So, erm, look for that story a little later, I suppose. _


	2. Greensleeves

To many members of Gotham's criminal element, life is nothing but a game. When the normal world of taxes and red tape is no longer a concern, what's left but the desire to enjoy life to the fullest? To these few, the heists and homicides all boiled down to one simple thing: winning the game.

Part of the game, of course, was playing with the right people. Oh, certainly it was entertaining to poke at the police, just as it was entertaining to boot up Simetropolis 3 in God Mode and blow your virtual world to bits with a simple click of a button. But for the real fun, the challenge and the joy of the chase, it was necessary to tease the Batman out into the open.

This posed certain problems to the criminal craving Bat-interactions. Ignoring the fact that Batman had an overbooked dayplanner - with around twenty A-list villains, a growing number of B-list villains, and a never-ending list of gangsters, drug dealers, muggers, arsonists, thieves and killers to thwart, it was almost guaranteed that Batman had work every night of the week - the other major difficulty lay in the irritating period between the escape from Arkham and the start of the next big plan. What good was it to have the perfect idea for the perfect plot if Joe Nobody recognized you at the diner down the street and ratted you out to the cops?

Edward Nygma dealt with it the way few other rogues of his class could: with a simple change of wardrobe and maybe a fake mustache. In his time, he'd hidden from the cops in a variety of cunning disguises that let him blend in with the average downtown denizen. Of course, hiding from the _cops_ was a lot easier than hiding from his fellow rogues. The cops generally didn't have his address, for one, and he'd never spent enough time unmasked around the forces of justice for his face to make an impression on them. (In fact, normally it was them making an impression on his face.) It was easy to hide in a crowd. It was less easy to hide in your own home, where you couldn't easily be dismissed as 'just some guy in a trenchcoat'.

Eddie scowled blackly at the closet door. The little coat closet rattled and rung with the sound of frantic searching as Jackie ripped through boxes. "This plan is ridiculous," he groused as a shoe clacked into the wall. "It's never going to work!"

Jackie leaned out of the closet. A smear of dust, clinging to the sweat on her skin, left a fuzzy grey streak on her forehead. "Do you want to die?" she demanded.

"Well, no, but - "

"And do you want to go back to Arkham?"

"No! But - "

"Then shut up and put these socks in your bra!" A pair of kelly-green socks whizzed out of the dusty closet and smacked him in the face. With a look of utter distaste, he pulled the neck of his long green ballgown out and tucked the socks into place.

There were no faults in the plan per se. After all, if the trio had no problem with Jackie, they surely wouldn't mind another henchgirl lurking in the background...right? It was, as the saying went, just crazy enough to work.

Eddie fidgeted with his long, purple satin gloves and began seriously reconsidering the drawbacks of being shot. The cops would aim for the legs, wouldn't they? It took a long time to die from a leg wound, and well before then he'd be tucked into a nice, safe ambulance. Bullets didn't hurt _that_ much...

Jackie stuck her head out of the closet, raking Eddie over with a critical eye. "More socks," she decreed, tossing a balled-up pair in his direction. "And put these on." She brandished a pair of grape-colored tights in his direction.

Eddie folded his arms firmly over his socks. "No."

"You have to wear tights," Jackie said, exasperated.

"I do not! Quiz never wore tights with this dress!" he protested.

"Quiz probably didn't have hobbit feet," she pointed out. They examined the light dusting of hair on Eddie's bare feet and ankles. "Unless you're trying to look like Gotham's Manliest Henchgirl, you're wearing the tights."

"This is _ludicrous_!" he snapped.

"Well, we could always just shave your legs," she suggested brightly. "I'll go get the razor."

"I'll wear the tights," he grumbled, snatching them out of her hand and stalking haughtily into the bathroom.

"What's the problem, anyway?" Jackie called through the closed door. "Didn't you always wear that green pair to heists?"

"That was a _unitard_," he grumbled, hiking his flouncy skirt up and stuffing one foot into the purple tights. "They're completely different."

"How?" Jackie demanded.

His satiny fingers slipped on the tights. With a grunt of impatience, he bit the fingertips of the gloves and yanked them off before attacking the tights barehanded. How were tights different from his unitard? Well, for a start, he'd never worn a skirt over his unitard, and...there had to be other differences that he wasn't thinking of. "Oh, never - _mind_," he squeaked as he yanked the tights up. They were at _least_ a size too small. He wrestled the billowy skirt back down into place and retrieved his gloves from the floor, glaring at himself in the mirror as he shoved them back on.

The dress had looked gorgeous on Quiz. It looked somewhat less gorgeous on Eddie, who had a build reminiscent of a radiator. Socks could only do so much, after all. The bands of elbow elastic on the satin gloves were cutting off the circulation to his hands, while the purple tights were quickly cutting off the circulation to other, more vital bits of him. A thick layer of foundation had been pancaked onto his face, and light touches of eyeshadow, lipstick and mascara had done (in his opinion) absolutely nothing to disguise the fact that he was clearly a man in a dress. With a sigh, Eddie stuffed the new socks into place and shrugged at his humiliated reflection. Why hadn't he thought to stockpile weapons in _this_ lair? A gunfight would have been much more palatable than this monstrosity of an idea.

He flung the door open and waddled awkwardly back out to the closet. "Aren't there any bigger tights?"

"Nope." Jackie hurried out of the closet. In one hand, she held a bright red, curly wig. In the other was a pair of emerald green high heels, with a single question mark stamped in shiny black leather on the toes. Eddie took the shoes and winced as Jackie rammed the wig down onto his head, tucking his stray hair under it with quick fingers.

"Well?" he asked tentatively as she gave him a final looking-over.

"This honestly might work," she said, a touch of amazement in her voice. The little clock in the living room let out a cheery electronic _Beep_!_ Beep_!

"It's two!" she yelped, snatching up a dress for herself from the closet and scurrying into the bathroom.

Eddie perched unsteadily on the arm of the couch and crammed his feet into the too-small shoes. Slowly, like a newborn giraffe, he wobbled to his feet and tottered toward the kitchen. "How do you walk in these things?" he called, stumbling over a broken floorboard.

"Heel, toe, heel, toe," Jackie called back.

Heel, toe, heel, toooooh _shit_ - Eddie tumbled gracelessly to the ground and scowled at his uncooperative footwear. With one hand on the countertop, he levered himself up to a somewhat knock-kneed standing position again. Maybe he'd just go sit in the bedroom until they were gone.

* * *

Jackie wrenched her dress into place and did a mad dance as she fought to zip it up. A quick swipe with a washcloth took the dust off of her face, and a hurried finger-combing would have to do for her hair...

_Knock-knock-knock_. "Coming!" Jackie yelled. She hurried into the living room, black heels clacking on the floorboards, and rested a hand on the doorknob. Eddie scuttled into the back bedroom like an oversized green crab. The doorknob turned easily under her hand. "Hi," she said uncertainly to the quartet of beaming young women in street clothes outside her door.

"Hi!" Question shoved past Jackie and examined the empty living room. "Is he here?" she demanded as her three friends slipped in behind her.

"No," Jackie said firmly. From the back bedroom, there was a clatter of heels on floorboards, followed by the _skreek_ of someone landing on ancient bedsprings. "It's just me and the new girl," she explained quickly.

"New girl?" Question's eyes narrowed. "He's got a new girl _already_?"

She was worried about one new girl, when she'd clearly made three new friends of her own? Jackie shrugged. "Yeah. She's kind of..." Jackie made the time-honored little rotating motions by her head that indicated the lack of anything competent about the new girl. "Forget about her. What did you want to tell me?"

"Well, we didn't want to tell you, we wanted to _show_ you," Question said. "Get 'em!"

Jackie squealed with shock as Question and one of her companions seized her by the arms and dragged her out the door. "What are you doing? You said you wanted to talk-"

_Thud. _Jackie landed heavily in the back of a big, windowless van. "You don't have to do this!"

"We kinda do," the friend admitted, shoving her deeper into the van.

_Wham_. "Ow!" she protested as a billowing cloud of green fabric landed directly on top of her.

"Sorry," a falsetto voice fluted directly into her ear. Jackie winced as Eddie's satin-covered elbow burrowed into her ribs. The door slammed behind them. Seconds later, the van roared into life and screeched around a corner.

Skirts fluffed wildly as Eddie tumbled to the side. It was difficult to see in the tiny, enclosed space, but the badly-sealed door let enough light through to show them that they were in the back of a custom-outfitted van. A wall of steel mesh was thoroughly welded into place about three feet from the door, leaving them with nothing but a small padded area of floor to ride on. Clearly, this van had been used as a kidnapper's favorite toy in the recent past.

The girls up front cranked up the radio. Eddie and Jackie gave each other a hopeless look of defeat as the van lurched around another corner. They didn't dare say anything, but the message was brutally clear: They were going to die. No one ever invited someone out for ice cream by shoving them into the back of a van.

They rode in agitated silence for what seemed like an hour, bouncing into one another like forgotten toys as the van slammed around corners. And then, with another painful _screech_ of the brakes, the van stopped. "We're here!" Question sang from the front seat. In perfectly synchronized motions, the girls darted out of the van and collected Eddie and Jackie from the back. With hands clamped firmly over their eyes, the pair stumbled obediently along into a damp, musty-smelling room. The girls shoved them forward as they heard a door slamming directly behind them. Locks clicked closed like a row of guns being cocked.

The room they'd been escorted into was small and unfinished. A bare concrete floor, freshly swept, stretched blankly from wall to concrete wall. Pipes and wires stretched overhead, just out of reach beyond a rattly piece of chain link fence that sprawled atop the little room like the screened cover for an aquarium.

Jackie slumped miserably in the corner. Without turning her head, she was able to see the mountain of green satin that was Eddie settling himself in a similar position.

So this was it. They were going to die. They'd fallen for the girls' trap - though really, what else could they have done? - and now they were in a closet in a basement halfway across Gotham, waiting for the inevitable well-armed visitor to open their heavily locked door.

It wasn't right. It wasn't _fair_. Jackie stared numbly at her feet in their shiny black shoes. What had she ever done to deserve this? She'd never hurt anyone in her life!...well, Robin, but that had been an accident. She hadn't known about the death-trap, after all.

She couldn't believe that this was happening. In all her short time on this planet, she'd never intentionally done more than occasionally park on the yellow curbs. She'd never...

She'd never really done anything, though, had she? The shoes blurred as hot little tears of self-pity boiled up in her eyes. She'd never bought a house, or planted a garden, or done any of the hundreds of little things she'd always meant to get around to doing one day. She'd never gotten married. She'd never even had a real boyfriend -

Or had she? After surreptitiously wiping the tears out of her eyes, she glanced over at Eddie. He was sitting crosslegged under his enormous pouf of a skirt, staring at the wall with that out-to-lunch look that always meant he was planning something. She'd never met anyone with a mind like his. There probably _wasn't_ anyone else with a mind like his. In the three months that they'd spent together, she'd watched him come up with plans to acquire nearly everything that caught his eye. When he hadn't been plotting, he'd been hard at work making his plans happen, whether that meant rewiring deathtraps or carefully lettering his riddles onto bright green squares of paper. He was creative, and brilliant, and he never ran out of things to talk about.

And he'd kept her around - this man who was notorious for dropping henchgirls at the first sight of trouble. He had let her badger him into acting like a normal, law-abiding citizen for a full week! When Nightwing had tracked them down at that hotel, _he'd_ been the one to stay behind and make the trip to Arkham, a place that he obviously loathed. It didn't make sense!

Unless...unless he wasn't thinking of her as just another henchgirl. Her first instinct was to dismiss that thought - why would he ever like her _that _way? - but more and more memories crowded up to prove her right. When the girls had threatened her life previously, he'd found them a perfect place to hide. When he'd broken out of his cell just a few days ago, he'd gone from lair to lair, running in the dark wearing his instantly recognizable Arkham jumpsuit just to find her and get her to a safe place.

Under normal circumstances, her shyness might have kept her in the corner mulling the issue over for a few more centuries. But now, with the boldness of those who know they have nothing to lose, Jackie slid across the floor and settled down next to Eddie. He didn't appear to notice.

She prodded him lightly on the leg. "Hmm?" he asked, still half-trapped in the land of plans.

"Any bright ideas?" she asked, brittle cheerfulness wrapped around her words.

"Not being here seems like a pretty good idea to me," he sighed. Curiosity raised his eyebrow as he noticed what had to be an odd expression on Jackie's face. "What? What is it?"

"I..." Jackie muttered, twisting the hem of her dress. "I wanted...I thought maybe..." A door slammed on the floor above them. They might not have much time left. Abruptly, trying to outrace the thought that this might not be such a good idea, Jackie leaned closer to Eddie and tentatively kissed him. He didn't move a muscle. "I'm sorry," she muttered, turning away.

"No!" A gloved hand slipped under her chin and gently turned her face back toward his. "You're not allowed to be sorry for that." When she dared to look at his face, she saw an unexpected expression of happiness mixed with...love? Before she could answer, he tilted his head and returned her kiss.

It was not a kiss that lit the world on fire. It certainly wasn't an overblown, end-of-the-movie style encounter where the two participants endeavor to swallow each other's skulls. In the end, it was nothing more than a lovely, soft little kiss that set Jackie's skin tingling.

She shivered, partly from delight, but mostly from the fact that humans were not meant to sit on icy concrete floors in tiny green dresses. Eddie draped a fold of his dress over Jackie's bare, goosebumped legs. With a ridiculously goofy smile on her face, Jackie scooted a little closer and dared to lay her head on his satiny shoulder. In turn, he rested his own fluffily bewigged head on top of hers.

At least if they were going to die, they'd die happy.

They sat together as the endless minutes ticked by, listening to heavy footsteps creaking on the floor above them. A rapid pounding of boots on wood indicated that someone was coming downstairs. They jumped up, brushing dirt from their dresses and facing the unknown perils that lay beyond their door.

The locks, one by one, clacked open. With a slight, protesting squeak, the door swung inward. "Come on," Question invited, beckoning at the uncertain pair of prisoners. "It's time."

(_to be continued_)

* * *

_Author's Note: Apparently I hang around with too many cross-dressers. Or not enough. Regardless, I'll dedicate this chapter to everyone who hits on cute young ladies and is then flabbergasted that they're actually dudes. It's amazing what a couple of socks and a wig can do!_


	3. Girl Trouble

Edward Nygma was familiar with the feeling of impending death in the same way that a pet rat is familiar with being in a cage. Over the years, he'd found himself in enough life-or-death situations that he'd developed a kind of mental block against the typical panic and dread that would overwhelm the average person. In fact, he'd come to take a sort of twisted pride in his unemotional response to peril. Where most people would cry, or think back on their wasted life, or get maudlin at the thought of the future they'd never see, he would mentally hunker down and get to work on ways to get himself out of there as soon as possible. Musing on past mistakes was an easy way to get yourself killed. (Admittedly, it was a little difficult to ignore past mistakes when you were sitting in a closet dressed in a formal ballgown with an itchy wig, but Eddie did his best to ignore his surroundings in order to focus on possible methods to get away.)

He'd pondered, thought, and speculated, and had finally come to the inescapable conclusion (such as it was) that the room was far too well-built. Even if the builders had made the mistake of putting only one lock in, or leaving the hinges on the inside of the room, the ever-present footsteps upstairs told him that upon their escape, they'd be re-captured in minutes.

His thoughts had ticked along in a new direction, focusing on the black possibilities of his upcoming demise. Maybe he'd be fortunate enough for his corpse to be dumped somewhere until the dress rotted off of it. That would be good - he'd hate to think of the reaction his fellow rogues would have if they knew he'd died in drag.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, Jackie had appeared next to him and kissed him. His memory of the incident was a little fuzzy - simultaneously entertaining thoughts of new love and imminent death would be enough to short-circuit anyone's brain - and the following few minutes had been almost warm and snuggly enough to make him forget about the fact that they were going to die.

The locks opening, however, reminded him all too well. He tugged on his wig as he stood up, making sure it wasn't going to move, and brushed a little patch of dust from his skirt. The door swung open, revealing Question as she moved her hand back up to the hilt of her holstered and rather large gun. "Come on," Question invited, beckoning at the uncertain pair of prisoners. "It's time."

Eddie, wobbly in his high-heeled shoes, tottered out of the closet, noting the pair of equally well-armed girls chatting in the corner of the stairwell. He and Jackie obediently followed Question up the stairs into the building itself.

It was a house - a small house, with a wide assortment of somewhat beat-up furniture littering the rooms. The place had been designed with as few walls as possible, and they were able to see just about the entire first floor from their vantage point by the basement stairway. Question led the group toward the far wall, her stilettoed boots clicking on the battered wooden floor. Women, gathered into little groups here and there, glanced up from their various conversations as the tiny parade passed by.

Eddie stopped abruptly as their faces came into view. _Oh, god_...he thought, stumbling forward as he felt Jackie prodding him in the small of the back. His heart thumped in a cadence of terror. This was worse than anything he'd imagined.

They were, to a woman, his ex-henchgirls. Paula and Liz, his Query and Quiz from a few years back, were constructing some kind of machine on the floor of the kitchen, with gears and wires spread in a wide arc around each of them. An ex-Question shared the dining room table with an ex-Query and an assortment of crossword puzzles, done in ink. A trio of ex-Qs with bright, unnaturally colored hair were sprawled in front of a television in the living room, cheering as a big-chinned man chainsawed a shotgun in half. In an area devoid of everything but the hardwood floor, a red-headed ex-Query with a stuffed tiger under one arm had one leg extended behind her in an almost impossible pose, demonstrating to an ex-Question her ideal method for a backwards kick to the jaw while escaping with an armful of loot.

Eddie's teeth were clamped so tightly together that it was beginning to give him a headache. He stumbled along in his ridiculous shoes, hoping to avoid the attention of all these women that he'd dismissed for one reason or another. There were exes _everywhere_! If they found him out, he was _dead_ and he shouldn't have just dumped them for the Bat to find, that had been a mistake, and maybe he shouldn't have hired so many girls in the first place and _henchmen_, why hadn't he gone with _men_, men didn't hold grudges until doomsday, specifically _his_ doom's day, and oh god he was going to _die_ -

Which only goes to show, of course, that even the most jaded individual will panic under the right circumstances.

Question led them up a creaky wooden staircase covered in patchy gray carpet. "I've got them," she announced to the room's occupants as she strolled in and settled down on a handy ottoman.

"Sorry you had to wait," Quiz said from her perch on the windowsill. "Claudia here just _had_ to get her nails done today."

"I didn't see you turning down that pedicure," Query snapped, shoving herself upright on the sofa.

"You didn't see the nail tech looking up your skirt, either," Quiz giggled. A pillow whacked her squarely in the face.

Eddie glanced nervously from face to face. This was...this was not what he'd expected. Not at all. They were far too cheerful, and there didn't appear to be any kind of death-device whatsoever in this room! (Minus the guns on their hips, of course, but no one shot their enemies in their own house. It was far too messy.) What was going on?

"Guys?" Question said, irritated. "Can we get started?"

Query finally took her attention off of Quiz and looked toward the door. "Sure. You can sit - Who's that?" Query demanded, pointing at Eddie. Sweat popped out on the back of his neck, capturing the strands of his fluffy wig and holding them to his skin.

"That's his new girl," Question explained. "I figured we'd bring her, too."

"What's he calling you?" Quiz asked.

"E-echo," Eddie falsettoed.

"Huh. He hasn't used that one in a while. Have a seat," Query said, waving to a loveseat with two overstuffed and only slightly torn up cushions. Eddie and Jackie uneasily obeyed. Jackie's elbow almost invisibly jammed into Eddie's side as he settled down and let his knees drift apart. Hurriedly, he pulled his legs together and crossed his ankles firmly.

"We've got some...things to discuss," Quiz ventured, glancing uncertainly at her cohorts as Question flopped down on the couch next to Query.

"Before you kill us?" Jackie blurted out.

"What?" Query glared at Question. "I thought I told you to send that letter to her!"

"I did!" Question protested. "You got the letter, right?"

"Well, yeah, but..." Jackie stammered. "I mean, you _kidnapped_ us."

"We had to! Well, sort of," Question fumbled. "It's complicated."

And indeed, it was. The trio launched into their explanation with gusto, correcting one another and saying what they wished to say regardless of who was already saying it. Eddie could feel his brain melting as he tried to keep up with three versions of the past few months delivered in a cross between an argument and a bedtime story.

"It was back in September - "

"No, it was October."

"It was August!"

Question yelled "Shut up! It was a few months ago, when Jackie and Nygmuffins -"

"Don't call him that!" Quiz ordered.

"Why not?" Question snapped.

"That's _my_ name for him!" Quiz sulked.

"When the two of them disappeared," Query bellowed over the argument. "We got back and they were gone..."

* * *

When you are a rogue in Gotham, you have to learn to be able to change your plans to fit the situation. If you've planned for Batman to break in through the conveniently unlocked door that will lead him through the long, twisting hallway filled with traps, and instead he breaks in through the skylight and lands directly on top of your very expensive and intricate City-Ruining Machine, you have to be able to plan a way to stop him (or, when that doesn't work, to be able to plan a way to get out of the building before he sends you back to Arkham).

The girls had come up with a fairly simple plan that October: break into the lair and get their boss back. When they'd discovered a new henchgirl there, wearing Query's favorite dress, they had changed their plan to something featuring a little more fatal violence. (Fatal violence, as it turned out, was probably the most popular choice of new plans among Gotham's underworld, topping the list over such choices as Throw Henchmen At The Bat or Run Like A Rabbit.) But before they could do anything, Eddie had appeared and - after a rather pleasant hello - had sent them off to get the doors fixed. As ordered, they'd gone to Carlos and filled him in on the situation. Then, with the last of their cash, they'd gone to Famous Ralph's Not-at-all-Original Pizza and splurged on three huge pizzas with all the toppings. It had taken them almost twenty minutes to fight traffic, and now they were finally back where they belonged - in their lair, with their boss and a delicious dinner.

"Hello?" Question called happily into the lair as she shoved past the shattered door. Hot pizza grease leaked onto her hand. The boxes of pizza landed on the couch as Question shoved her burned hand into her mouth. "_Mmmmf_!" she swore through her mouthful of herself.

"Nygmy-pie?" Quiz asked, ignoring her compatriot as she poked her head into the bedroom. "Eddiekins...are you here?"

"Maybe he's out getting rid of that other one," Query suggested, flopping on the bright green armchair and throwing her legs over one question-marked arm. "Pass the pizza."

"Shouldn't we wait for him?"

"Nah," Query dismissed, carefully folding a huge slice of pizza in half. "It won't take long."

And so, with a brisk fall breeze blowing through the open door, they waited.

And waited.

And waited.

"He is coming back, isn't he?" Quiz asked, looking at the clock. "It's been five hours!"

"Should we go look for him?" Question suggested. Query, snuggled under the enormous green blanket, didn't answer. "Query?" A soft little snore whistled from Query's mouth.

_Whap_! A magazine connected with Query's head. "What? I'm awake!" she gasped, sitting bolt upright.

"Do you want to go look for Eddie?" Question repeated. "He still isn't back yet."

"'Kay," Query yawned. "Five more minutes."

"Now," Question ordered, yanking the blanket off.

"Up!" Quiz commanded, pulling insistently on Query's arm.

"I'm coming, I'm coming," Query grumbled, shaking her so-called friends off of her. "He's a big boy. I'm sure he's fine."

They retraced their steps, visiting lair after lair. Eddie wasn't there. He wasn't in any of the other places they could think of - not even the bar that he'd met them in - and so, to wind up their search, they found themselves standing in the bar at the Iceberg Lounge.

Most of the patrons, tired and dreading work in the morning, had cleared out by now. Even most of the rogues had called it a night and abandoned the bar in favor of their beds.

"Wheeee!" The trio giggled quietly at the sight of Harley Quinn spinning wildly around on her barstool. "Gimme one more!"

"Haven't you had enough?" the bartender asked, with a tone in his voice indicating that they both knew that she'd had more than enough and, likewise, that they both knew he wasn't going to stop serving her since he enjoyed breathing.

"Nope! One more, and..." She squinted through smeared makeup as the trio approached her. "An' three for them!"

"Hi," Query said, a trifle uncertainly. They'd never actually met any of the big-name rogues before. "Have you seen Eddie anywhere?"

"Who's askin'?" Harley chirped.

"We're his henchgirls," Quiz offered.

Harley tilted her head, making her tassels bounce. "What happened to Query?"

"I'm right here," Query said, confused.

"No, the _other_ one. Kinda short, brownish hair..." She giggled. "Likes pretzels..."

"Oh, _her,_" Quiz said. "Well, Eddie said he was getting rid of her, but he never came back."

Harley spun reflectively on her stool, coming to an abrupt, jerky halt as she grabbed the bar. A wrist ruffle collided with a bowl of peanuts, which skittered off of the edge of the bartop and landed in a dusty pile around the bartender's feet. With a patient look plastered over his irritation, the man stooped to clean the mess up.

"He told you he was gettin' rid of her?"

"Yeah," Question nodded.

"An' you _believed_ him?" Harley chuckled.

"Well, yeah!" Question said. "I mean, he's our boss...right?"

"Lemme ask ya this," Harley said, "how'd yer last heist go?"

"Um..." The trio looked at one another. "Well, we got the money," Query said defensively.

"And we got out of the building all right," Quiz added. They both looked accusingly at Question.

"..._mrph tbd bmble,_" she muttered.

"What?"

"I T-boned the Batmobile," she admitted sheepishly. "But I wouldn't have done it if those two hadn't been fighting over money in the backseat!"

"We weren't _fighting_!" Quiz protested.

"You punched her in the face!"

"I did not!" Quiz sulked. "It was _her_ that punched _me_!"

"Liar!" Query gasped.

"Oh, you don't remember?" Quiz snapped. "I was just sitting there and you _hit_ me! Right here!" she added, jabbing a neatly manicured fingernail into her cheek.

"I only hit you because you kicked me!" Query shouted.

"I nudged you with my foot!"

"You left a bruise so deep the nurse at the prison wanted to make sure you hadn't broken my leg!" Query bellowed.

"Guys?" Question said, yanking on their jackets.

"And another thing," Query yelled, ignoring Question, "when we were fighting Batman you tripped me!"

"_I_ was trying to kick him in the head," Quiz shrieked. "_You_ got in my way!"

"GUYS!" Question hissed.

"WHAT?" the pair bellowed at her.

"Look."

They turned back toward the bar. Harley Quinn, arms folded across her abdomen, was gasping for more breath to laugh with. Tears of hilarity streamed down her face, smearing white makeup over the black of her mask. Then, like a tree falling in the woods, Harley collapsed sideways off of her stool and hit the ground. (Unlike a tree falling in the woods, however, there was no question that a falling Harley made a sound, given that her laughter was probably loud enough to be heard all the way to Metropolis.)

"No wonder he fired ya," she giggled.

"He didn't fire us!" Query snapped.

"It's amazin' he hired ya in the first place," Harley snickered, climbing back up onto her barstool. "Where'd ya meet him?"

"The Dirty Duck."

"An' was he drunk?" The trio looked at each other in silence. "I thought so," Harley said, taking another swig of her drink. "He's gotta stop hirin' girls when he's sloshed."

"Look, we just want to know where to find him!" Query said.

"If he doesn't want you ta find him, you're not _gonna_ find him," Harley pointed out. "He's replaced ya already. It's over."

"But we broke out of jail to keep working for him!" Question stomped a foot.

"So what? He doesn't want you anymore. He's got the new one now." Ice rattled in Harley's glass. "Hey, guy! Empty glass over here!" The bartender obediently filled it to the brim.

"Why'd he get a new girl already?" Quiz asked, hurt. "I mean, we were doing okay. We were even sending him riddles and stuff! Why would he like her more than us?"

Harley shrugged. "Well, she did get him away from Batsy twice..." She giggled again as a memory struck her. "You're the ones that wrote those riddles? The 'Fry skin' and the wolf one?"

"Yeah..."

Harley burst out into a new storm of laughter. "You made him so_ mad_," she chuckled. "I've never _seen_ him that mad before!" She threw back the rest of her drink. "Yer lucky he didn't skin _you_." The empty glass clinked as it was abruptly deposited back on the bartop. "Yer sure ya haven't seen Red?" she asked the bartender plaintively.

"Miss Isley hasn't been in tonight," the bartender said with the air of one that had said it all evening.

"Well, if she's not gonna show up, I'm outa here," Harley said, snatching up her smiley-face bag. "Maybe she's back at the greenhouse. Later!" She wove her way through the sparse crowd of committed drinkers and stumbled toward the coat room.

"Was she serious?" Quiz asked, running a finger around in the puddle of condensation dripping off of their three untouched drinks.

"Harley Quinn? Serious?" Question snorted.

"I think she had a point, though," Query muttered. "Eddie did seem awfully...upset tonight."

"So we're not henchgirls anymore?" Quiz demanded, pinging her glass with a short green fingernail. "What are we gonna do? We can't just _quit_..."

"We're gonna have to go back to being on our own," Question moped. "Boring ol' gas stations and liquor stores."

"And pawn shops," Quiz added with disgust. "I _hate_ pawn shops. They smell funny."

"Well, we're only in them for a few minutes..."

"Yeah, but the money always smells funny too." Quiz wrinkled her nose fastidiously. "Don't you think so?" She nudged Query. "Query?"

"You may as well stop calling me that," not-Query sulked. "Since Eddie fired us and everything."

"Fine. _Claudia_."

Ex-Query Claudia morosely kicked at a barstool. "I don't know. This sucks."

"I wonder what the others did," Quiz said, taking a tentative sip of her drink.

"Others?"

"Y'know...his other henchgirls. I wonder what they do now, since he fired them."

A wide, delighted smile lit up Claudia's face. "You're brilliant, Tiffany!" She snatched her companion by the arm and dragged her toward the door.

"I am?"

"Yes! I've got the perfect idea! C'mon, Delilah, we've got work to do!"

No-longer-Question snatched a handful of pretzels. "Coming!"

* * *

"So anyway," Claudia said, buffing her newly-polished nails on the couch cushions, "we went looking for all of Eddie's old girls."

"Some were still in jail," Delilah offered.

"And some were in Arkham or somewhere," Tiffany dismissed, waving her hand vaguely in the air. "We couldn't find a lot of them."

"But the ones we found were pretty bored with doing normal stuff. It's fun, doing the costume thing, but without a theme you can't really do a costume - "

"Well, you can," Tiffany interrupted, "but it's kinda dumb, and no one cares if you're dressed up like a Care Bear just for the hell of it."

"A...Care Bear?" Jackie said, confused.

All three rolled their eyes. "Don't ask," Claudia sighed. "Anyway, the costume thing wasn't working for the others on their own - "

"So we thought we could all join up together!" Delilah chirped from her spot on the ottoman. Claudia pointedly cleared her throat. "Claudia thought it up," Delilah explained, "but we all helped. I mean, the Mafia does pretty well, and there's a ton of them, right?"

"Everyone wanted in, pretty much. Paula and Liz build all the machinery and the neat stuff, and the double-Ds take care of the planning part, and the rest of us get to do the fun things!" Tiffany said in an excited squeak.

"The fun things?" Jackie asked, letting the reference to 'double-Ds' slide for the moment.

"You know, the _robberies_!" Delilah gushed. "We've each got our own theme, so the Bats don't know we're all part of the same group. We're the Weather Girls! She's Twister, and she's Cirrus."

"And what about you?"

"I'm..." Delilah shrugged. "Well, until I think of something better, I'm the Drizzle. I was _gonna_ be Storm, but that was taken," she pouted.

"That's...very nice," Jackie said. "What does any of that have to do with us?"

Tiffany giggled. "We want you to join us, silly!"

"But I'm still working for Eddie." Eddie's satiny elbow nudged Jackie in the ribs. "_We're_ still working for Eddie," she corrected hastily.

"Yeah, for a few more weeks," Claudia said, rolling her eyes.

"He's gonna dump you sooner or later," Tiffany said.

Delilah chimed in with "And when he does decide to get rid of you, you don't want to face down the Batman by yourself. It's not fun at _all_."

"Look, he's not going to..." Jackie floundered. "I _like_ him."

"Yeah, you like him now," Tiffany snorted. "Wait until you're all alone with Mr. Batface."

"What about you...Echo?" Claudia said, narrowing mascaraed eyes at Eddie under his wig. "Are you going to do the smart thing and join us now?"

"No," he fluted uncertainly. "I'm, um, staying with...Eddiekins."

"Your loss," Tiffany shrugged. "Back in the van, then - we'll take you home."

"Can't we just get a cab?"

The trio shook their heads. "If we let you know where we are, then you'll let Eddiekins know," Delilah pointed out. "And he might get nervous about us and try to do something silly."

"He wouldn't," Jackie said loyally. Eddie, in his long satiny dress, was inclined to disagree.

"But we figure we'll leave him alone, and he'll leave us alone, and everything'll be good!" Tiffany said happily.

"Unless he wants to work with us again," Claudia chimed in.

"And even then, he'll have to ask nicely," Delilah smirked. "_If_ we decide we want to work with him, that is."

"He's nice and everything, but he's kind of a coward," Tiffany said.

"Yeah! I mean, what kind of a guy would leave his girls for Batman?" Claudia agreed.

Fury, like hot magma, boiled through his veins. Who the _hell_ did they think they were, maligning him like that? It wasn't _cowardice_ to leave them for the Batman, it was...it was...well, it was basically just a quick and dirty way to say goodbye. It _certainly_ wasn't because he was scared to face the Batman alone! Just because he'd hardly ever done it didn't mean he was _scared_ to!

The trio noticed the stony look on "Echo" and Jackie's faces. "All right, come on," Claudia sighed. "You'll believe us soon enough." With that, the group abandoned the tiny room in favor of cramming themselves into an even smaller space inside the van.

* * *

Eddie walked carefully into the lair, trying his best to keep himself from falling as he aimed himself straight for the kitchen. "Bye!" Jackie called to the van idling in the street.

"Give us a call when you need us!" Tiffany called back, waving as the van tore off down the street.

"Are they gone?" Eddie asked through clenched teeth.

Jackie shut the door. "They're gone."

The wig, suddenly airborne, shot across the room and draped itself over the food processor. The right high heel clattered into the dishwasher's door, and the left zipped through the air to land in the laundry basket. Socks flew in a mighty explosion of fabric as Eddie yanked the dress downward and kicked it into a pile near the stove.

Sweaty, furious, and clad only in a pair of purple tights, the Riddler glared at Jackie as she tried to stifle her laughter. "This never happened," he informed her in a growl, stomping toward the bathroom to scrape the layers of makeup from his face.

He'd had it with this town and its irritatingly large population of his ex-henchgirls. If only there was some way to get rid of them...between his fellow rogues and the forces of justice, things in the immediate future were looking irritatingly busy. If only there was some way to get away from it all...

He grinned at his rather damp reflection as inspiration hit him. Of course!

"Pack your bags," he called to Jackie.

"Again? Why are we hiding in another hotel?"

"We're not." He wriggled into his favorite black shirt. "We're going to the beach." Yes, a vacation was just what he needed. A nice, relaxing vacation, where nothing would go wrong...

One might suppose that the Riddler would stop thinking in these terms, particularly since his entire life seemed to be nothing _but_ a plan that had gone disastrously wrong. Still, hope isn't all bad - after all, optimism is the spark that lights the candle. Unfortunately, in the Riddler's case, it was about to set the room on fire.

* * *

_Author's Note: If you thought you recognized an ex-Q here and there - you're right! I blatantly stole (erm, _borrowed_) them because I adore them so. Surely the authors of those other tales will forgive me for a little loving reference or two...yes?_

_Eddie and Jackie's story will continue in "Beach House". I'm sorry I was somewhat late putting this chapter up, but you know how it is - you start writing, and you lose track of time, and before you know it you're late for your appointment to be fitted for your zombie hippie costume. (I love working in haunted houses!) In the meantime, stay tuned for more of "Medical Help", guest-starring Dr. McNinja and Dr. Horrible, as well as more Sorrow and perhaps a story starring a certain Mad Hatter. Thanks for reading!_


End file.
